I get bronchitis once or twice a year. The method by which I clear it is to hang upside down until the s* just comes out of me by coughing as hard as I can. That sounds awfully similar.
551 karma · joined July 10, 2016
but I read somewhere that the half-life of this thing in direct sunlight is 2.5 minutes so after an hour or so it's pretty much gone if that's true.
I saw a shift in behavior following Trump's conference appointing Mike Pence as the effective coronavirus czar.
Every morning there was a small stash of N95 masks at my local Home Depot until yesterday. Similarly I started seeing specific sorts of non-perishables disappearing from the shelves of Trader Joe's and Safeways. Where it goes next, I don't know. But I think the crowd has spoken on the subject already.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/16/china-bubonic-plague-ou...
This could have been a non-starter had not the Chinese Communist party covered this up as long as they did. That's what needs to change. There might be a genetic predilection for Asians to be susceptible to coronaviruses, but if we attack these things head-on as they emerge, they won't amount to much.
If we pretend they're not happening, one day we're going to get a pandemic. That day might be today unfortunately but only time will tell.
But I agree it's absolutely absurd no matter who's pushing these. And all it amounts to is ideological theatre on both sides of the fence. And I don't think that theatre is going to close during my lifetime.
And that's for the same reason that no matter how much data they feed Tesla's self-driving AI, it will still try to kill you now and then. The problem space is just too big. All the people I know in this space don't think it will be solved for at least a decade and maybe not even then.
But I do suspect the 2020s will see the creation of agents combining classical algorithms with deep neural networks to do amazing things in domains that are closed and constant. But they're all going to be glorified (yet wonderful) unitaskers.
The only thing that worries me is that I don't trust FAANG to do the right thing ever anymore, and it's amazing to me that so many have opted into the panopticon of things in exchange for the ability to order stuff and turn their gadgets on and off.
https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...
This would reduce a nearly impossible job in machine intelligence to a really difficult simulation problem.
But I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Less thought-leadering, more actual results please.
OTOH I chose to pursue a PhD in biochemistry rather than be the third member of the Yost group and that led to 3D Studio.
So I will boil my heuristic down to TLA or BigCo. I'd miss out on the next Facebook or Google with such a heuristic but what are the chances I would get an opportunity to join one of those companies at the ground floor in the first place?
in recent years, there was one startup bought out at a modest price for which I might have made epsilon more money being their CTO but it would have come with sleepless nights and anxiety at no additional cost.
We will have solved artificial intelligence and that's a game changer. It will create an age of limitless wealth. But what I wonder about is whether our hindbrains will insist on maintaining inequality in an age where everything is cheap and plentiful. And what will the AIs make of us?
Who cares about health care if there's cheap immortality? That's the best healthcare of them all. But will we make it generally available or will we try to attach artificial value to it as an entitlement?
And that's because once people stop dying from natural causes we're going to have a population problem. That means we're going to have to get off world.
That also means that climate change becomes irrelevant because if we can terraform Mars etc, then tweaking the climate of the Earth is trivial.
The one true god that has delivered on all of its promises is science and I don't think it's done delivering the good stuff. But it's also a wrathful and vengeful god in the wrong hands.
But even then, I'd rather live in the above future then in a future where we continue all of our petty squabbles over which nation state is the best. That's creating misery worldwide. We could end hunger and homelessness today for pennies on the dollar. But we refuse to do so in favor of a huge military and prison industrial complex. All that's doing for us IMO is giving other countries a chance to leapfrog us mid-21st century.
So I'd suggest you do as I am doing. Fight your own mortality to your dying breath and try to make a difference between now and your probably inevitable dirt nap because it might not be inevitable because we're heading for one hell of a phase transition (no singularity required).
My own frustration is that most of our so-called challenging problems have relatively simple solutions, but one or more of the above tribes will block those solutions so we go nowhere fast. That said, the world is a lot better than it was a hundred years ago. And if we ever collectively get our heads out of our butts and own our bipartisan $h!+, we can fix this. But I'm personally betting that won't happen until we get a moment of clarity delivered to us from China or India. And I'm not sure I'll still be above ground by then.
The conversation that I posted at:
https://medium.com/@scottlegrand/my-interview-with-the-world...
is performed in one shot. And I think it shows both the abilities and the limitations of GPT-2 and similar models. I am 100% role playing with the language model and prompting it to go in the directions it goes, but it surprised me several times, and eventually it all fell apart because I didn't perform any transfer learning on the model I just used the raw GPT-2 XL model to measure whether further work would be worth the effort and I would conclude yes it would be.
The first thing I need to do is dramatically increase the length of its input context. It's pretty good at running with an ensuing script because I suspect much of its training data was formatted that way. But since I ran out of context symbols, it eventually suffers from several incidents of amnesia and eventually effective multiple personality disorder. It also contradicts itself several times but then no more than the typical thought leader or politician does IMO.
What The Economist did was effectively erase the thing's memory between questions. So they were starting fresh with each question. And I think that's why they had to do the best of 5.
And in my industry experience, having an encyclopedic knowledge of an obscure subject around a bunch of imposters does not go well, doubly so if their career depends on convincing others that they have skills on par with yours despite never putting the time into acquiring them.
To me it's like they demand everyone be fungible when the real power move is using comparative advantage to build a winning team.
Edit: I'm always surprised by which of my posts get the downvotes. Wonder whom I'm offending this time.
that said I think if you made its context recurrent in some way between responses and queries you could probably build a really interesting chatbot that could ramble about just about anything and nothing but do so in a sufficiently coherent way to scare up venture capital. Just a guess but it is my guess.
Instead I saw it as a change of basis from the space of previous purchases to the space of recent purchases. That approach led to an entire AI framework and it still makes Amazon quite a bit of money annually apparently if Jeff Wilke's 2019 Re:MARS speech is to be believed.
I'd love to work on something more ambitious like AlphaGo or AlphaFold but those require tremendous resources and I'm really focused on bang for buck. But even then I'd see it as the marriage of classical search with modeling the probability of victory.
If someone says that the AGI is almost upon us I pretty much bozo bit them no matter how prestigious or fancy they may be otherwise.